by M G Vassanji
Deepa had returned from England with Dilip at about the time of the Asian Exodus—as the migration came to be called—with two-year-old Shyam in tow and pregnant with her daughter Alka. Dilip acquired a pharmacy on Government Road, and the two seemed well settled and happy. It was a joy to go and see her those days, preoccupied with her boy and her pregnancy, mature and less impulsive than before, contented and philosophical about life. She lived with her in-laws and there was a cool but not hostile relationship between her and Meena Auntie. She and Mother had made up and often got together, and she would come and look up Papa on Sunday mornings as he sat down with his paper, listening to Hindustani music on the radio and working on the Spot-the-Ball competition in the Nation. He needs the prize money for sure, Mother would comment sarcastically, to make up for his British woman’s theft. Deepa would lecture Mother on the need to look after him, and Mother would hmph and retort with something like, He’ll be all right.
I had seen only a little of Njoroge in the last few years, since Deepa’s wedding and her departure. He was a rising government bureaucrat specializing on Kenya’s infamous land question, and I was aware that he had been overseas on training. He had found his calling and was well set to achieve his ambitions, it seemed to me, while I was nowhere close to even a life of my own. After graduating I had apprenticed in Limuru at a shoe factory and in Kisumu at a tire retreading company, before settling in uncertainly with my father in his business. Therefore it came as a pleasant surprise when Njoroge phoned me at the office late one afternoon to ask whether my family or anyone else close to us needed help in these trying times of the Asian departures. I replied that we were unaffected, we all had become citizens long ago, adding somewhat arrogantly (and, I am ashamed to say, perhaps to gain approval) that it was only those who had hung on to colonial coattails who were now in trouble, on their way to an England that despised them. We agreed to meet, and during our lunch together, hearing of our real estate woes and Papa’s recent humiliation and money loss (he couldn’t help a loud guffaw at that), he said he would set up a job interview for me in government, if I was interested. I very much was.
It was that short innocent meeting with a childhood friend whom I had not seen much since his involvement and breakup with my sister that set me off on my life’s path and the career that I have followed. There are doubtless those who will say that, intrinsically corrupt as I am, I would have no doubt reached the same degenerate end through some other means. You will judge for yourself. Here I was, a young Asian graduate in an African country, with neither the prestige of whiteness or Europeanness behind me, nor the influence and numbers of a local tribe to back me, but carrying instead the stigma from a generalized recent memory of an exclusive race of brown “Shylocks” who had collaborated with the colonizers. What could I hope to achieve in public service? Black chauvinism and reverse racism were the order of the day against Asians.
With a strong recommendation from Njoroge, though, I won a job at the Ministry of Transportation. For three months I was the comptroller at the ministry offices, a duty given to me, I believe, under the assumption that as an Indian I was naturally adept at handling large sums of money. Behind a bulletproof glass cage with my heaps of newly minted notes and coins, I also did not have to be dealt with socially. We Asians were considered strange in our ways. (Though, to be fair, in the Nairobi offices of those times, a Boran, a Turkana, or even a Masai would have seemed equally if not more alien.) My break from this boredom came, however, when I volunteered to join a team of auditors setting out to evaluate the complete worth of the Kenya portion of the East African Railways. With Tanzania having taken a stridently socialist direction, rumour was that it would not be long before common services among the three East African countries disintegrated. Every section of rail, every locomotive, defunct in its shed or operating, every bogey, tanker, and flatcar, all the signals and relays in the store yards, and even the eucalyptus trees imported and planted next to the tracks in the old days of wood fuel received a price tag from us. The auditors were the venerable company of Anderson Peacock from Nairobi, working in collaboration with an engineering outfit from Manchester in England.
According to my family, my arrival at the East African Railways was pure destiny—kismet and karma combined, sheer good fortune and just reward. We had come full circle, from my grandfather laying down rails at the inception of the railway to myself, assistant auditor and inspector on the line in independent Kenya. No other job could have thrilled me so much. As a boy I had dreamt of speeding on a railway engine from Lake to Coast, crossing the country back and forth, head and shoulders leaning out proudly to appraise the world flying past before me, like those Sardarji engineers I admired. I would imagine trains travelling west from Nairobi to Lagos and Accra, south to Cape Town, north to Khartoum and Cairo, uniting all Africa. Now I had the rare fortune to fulfil that childhood dream as closely as possible in the circumstances. The country was mine to explore, on this mysterious metal highway stretching from the coast into the interior, its iron rails reaching to diverse, far-flung and strange places; stories clung to it and ghosts still haunted its path. It could well have been called the Thousand and More Miles of Fantastic Lives and Ghost Stories.
For a month, initially, a Scottish auditor, an English engineer, and I scoured the old Mombasa station for inventory and came away with scores of items untouched for half a century or more, most of them now quite worthless: ancient tool chests; a crate full of fragments of rat-eaten rupee notes, a portion of them apparently indigestible by rodents because of the kind of ink used; partly eaten rugby balls and boot soles; tinned food; a barber’s handbag, intact, containing among the tools a little Quran. One of the most intriguing finds was the remains of a hand-bound notebook: the pages inside had almost entirely been nibbled away, but the inside front cardboad cover had the remains of the signature “Patterson” inscribed upon it. We imagined it to have been an early draft of the famous memoir, or a diary, of the man by that name who had shot the equally famed man-eating lions of Tsavo on the railway; one of my companions took away the relic, presumably to check the handwriting against a known manuscript by the famous man. I never learnt if he had any luck. The railway shed still had one of the hand-operated trolleys that served to take passengers around old Mombasa town in the pioneering days of colonial rule; they could seat one to four and were quite open to the elements and to curious gazes. There also lurked rusting hulks of old locomotives that had been technically scrapped, each of which we inventoried; each had a year of birth, a pedigree, a biography. Those in good condition were designated for the proposed railway museum in Nairobi. And once a week, with a lot of attention and ceremony, like a mighty and fierce god—Jupiter or Ngai—on wheels, the earth atremble under its iron weight, one of the 59 Series Garratts, the most powerful steam locomotives ever, would head off for Nairobi, pulling up to an altitude of fifty-five hundred feet a long trainload of imported goods to service our voracious capital.
Some seventy miles out of Mombasa all trains slow down to a crawling pace as they pass the mosque at the small McKinnon Road station, out of respect for the sufi saint Sayyed Bagh Ali, who lies buried there. Not to observe this token of respect is to hazard an accident, a supernatural road calamity. Even on the parallel highway motorcars, buses, and trucks observe this token of respect. The saint is said to have been a railway coolie, giver of spiritual solace to fellow workers; my dadaji had spoken about this mentor, though I don’t know if he had actually met him. According to legend, when the saint carried karais of sand or cement on his head, they would not actually touch but rested balanced in the air a few inches above him. This was because the djinns carried the karais for him.
About fifteen miles beyond his grave my two co-workers and I came upon an unused railway siding curving off mysteriously into the savannah. We had our little inspection train pulled into this track, where it stopped a few yards inside; our interest piqued—the place was not marked on any map—we decided to follow t
he track on foot. Our engine driver advised us against this, with a shake of the head. Bad luck, he said. But we were undeterred. We walked through waist-high yellow grass (the rains had not come yet) following the old track and singing—Sixteen men on a dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum—this having become our theme song ever since we discovered the money chest with rat-eaten rupees in Mombasa. About half a mile in, we entered a grove of trees. Here the track abruptly ended in front of the remains of a small European-style cottage constructed out of stone, complete with chimney, embraced between two large tree trunks, their branches reaching out like grasping arms. Parked in front of this house was a small train: a tank-type locomotive and two carriages. There was nothing save dust and debris inside the house—no furniture, no curtains; no remains, animal or human; no snakes. Everything had been removed, nothing had entered to seek shelter. The locomotive was an old American Baldwin made in Philadelphia in 1902, according to its nameplate. Its cabin was caked in leaves and dust, but the brass still shone when wiped. One of the carriages was empty, perhaps it had been used to carry luggage and servants; the other one, in front, had been furnished for private use, with bunk beds and a table. We were simply flabbergasted by the sight. The locomotive, numbered 63, was designated “scrapped” in the railway books for 1920; yet here it was in front of us, completely intact, as if ready to go if its water tanks were filled and the furnace set going with firewood. When news broke of its discovery, an Italian film company purchased it to revamp and use in the making of its popular westerns.
Sometimes I was sent by myself to take stock of stations or even inspect lonely stretches of track on rarely used, almost forgotten routes. On the northward branch line that goes from Nakuru to Solai, I was asked to stop at a tiny defunct station once called Jamieson. The station house was now dilapidated. An old railway clock lay broken on the floor, fallen from the crossbeam above. Old ledger and receipt books were scattered among the debris around it. Behind the station, between steep grassy banks, flowed a thin stream, and on its opposite side stood a ramshackle tin-roofed house, its whitewash faded, its warped, discoloured door swinging open from an equally warped frame. As I stepped off the log crossing, a large white woman in khaki shorts and shirt came hurrying over from the side of the house; wisps of white and gold hair blew across her face, she was breathing hard and her neck was red from exertion. Hullo, she said in a throaty voice. Behind her came to stand an African man, shorter, somewhat older, and balding. Her name was Janice, and his, Mungai. Her husband Jamieson had been the town station master, before he was killed in 1952 in a robbery; along with their two children, she added drily, with a nod and a look in my eye. The station had been renamed after the dead man soon after, and then closed a few years later when the white settlers of the area all started leaving. Janice did not go. She and Mungai eked out a living farming on the land. They were having lunch and I was offered okra and plantain, with warm homemade beer, on a table in the backyard. In a far corner of the yard lay three well-tended graves, side by side and marked by stones. I had been sent here because the Nakuru office had reported receiving tickets issued at nonexistent Jamieson and did not know how to proceed. Janice said the locals often waved down trains and liked to have a ticket in hand when they did so. She and her husband (she meant Mungai this time) had been issuing old unused tickets to whoever needed them, without cost, and the conductors on the train seemed to honour them. The only thing I found of value at Jamieson was a reel of copper wire. It was railway property and accompanied me on my way back.
I recall, on another occasion, on another track, coming across a railway siding that led to a former poachers’ haven—a grim and eerie killing field, dotted with bleached elephant and rhino remains, overseen by empty log cabins and fiercely guarded by wild dogs; my companions and I beat a hasty retreat, fearing less the dogs than poachers who might be around. Another time I was shown a rail car, on the Kisumu-Butere line, that had fallen off a viaduct into a deep ravine many years ago and never been reclaimed, dead passengers and all. The car was brought up following my report, and the bodies were buried in a mass grave at the nearest railway station.
I had taken to my wanderings well. I know that I was lonely at times, especially when I found myself travelling alone; but I carried with me a constant sense of wonder and discovery; there was the cold thrill, when I stepped off the train, that I was about to uncover yet another hidden life on the railway. In that intermediate state, between place and place, one life and another life, perhaps there was also a kinship with my own inner nature. For some reason I became particularly attached to Jamieson and its two inhabitants, and in the future I would find occasions to visit there again. Possibly it was to be reminded of the dark nights of Jamieson that I came here, another seclusion, where I now write these notes.
Finally, however, I was brought back to a desk job in Nairobi, an outcome with which my anxious family were more than happy. My new duties were to assess the tenders and proposals received by the Ministry of Transport, Railway Division, and I was directly responsible to the Permanent Secretary, Ben Oletunde.
Often during my travels for the railways I stopped over in Nakuru to visit my grandparents and uncles. Both my uncles’ children had grown up and gone on overseas or to Nairobi. The neighbourhood in which I had lived with my parents and sister now looked somewhat worse for the wear, though in other respects not very different. The old servant quarters, where Mwangi and Njoroge and the others had lived, and which had been subjected to frequent and nasty police raids, had been built over and let out to tenants. At the back of the development, a slum had sprung up, proceeding to a bustling Bondeni and thence in raucous lines of dwellings and unpaved potholed streets to the beautiful pink lake of a myriad flamingos. Nakuru was much more populous than before, and many formerly empty lots had been built over or simply occupied. It was behind our house, where the slums now were, that Njoroge had once brought me, and in a crude ceremony involving stripping and cutting ourselves made me swear an oath and pledge myself to Kenyatta. But our former house still had a thriving garden in front. I walked there one day, right through the gate, and spied under the window, in the flower bed, a rose which I had no doubt whatsoever was Beautiful Elizabeth—named by my father on Coronation Day, still growing where Mwangi had planted it. Its orange and red shades were unmistakable. Mwangi had planted it under the watchful eyes of Mother and Mrs. Bruce and Annie, who had sung for us that Sunday. Laudate dominum. Praise the Lord. Scenes from that childhood came rushing to my head, more real for me because more intensely felt than the life I now lived. How fragile, life; and how doubly so for that girl, like the wings of a butterfly, so easily crushed. She lived for me again, as I walked the old neighbourhood and relived the past. I thought of Mwangi and that whole episode sitting like a wound on my soul; a scar that did not hurt yet cast a gloomy shadow and would not ever disappear, by that very persistence making claim on a part of my life.
Mother had taken a cutting from that rose plant with her when we moved to Nairobi, but she could never make it grow. That day I knocked on the door, a servant opened it, and I asked for a flower and put it in my lapel.
Juma Molabux, my grandfather’s old friend, had died; his wife Sakina-dadi lived with her elder son, who had returned from his Masai existence to manage his father’s businesses. He was a prominent member of the town council now and would be seen in tie and jacket at the Nakuru Club. The younger son Saeed had left for England, one of the many Asians who retained British status and took up residency there.
Dadiji, my grandmother, died not long after my secondment to Anderson Peacock the auditors had ended and I began my new duties in Nairobi. I recall a scene at the gathering we had organized in her honour at the Club grounds after the cremation: Dada sitting on a chair, Sakina-dadi standing beside him, each looking far away and quite alone. Behind us, serving drinks, was the bar shed, its walls covered with group photographs of all the teams that had represented the Club. How the past was slippi
ng away; soon the untold stories among the older Molabuxes and the Lalls would simply have disappeared into the winds. Hardly a month before that, as a senior and now valued official of the railways, I had treated Dadaji to that ride on engine 5607, the Garratt “Sir George.” He died not long afterwards, within a year.
Taking a long walk from the house, on a cross-country trail I have been directed to, I come upon the tracks of the Canadian railway system. It’s not long before a low rumble is heard, like distant thunder, and then after some delay there appears from the east the electric “Sir John A. Macdonald,” in the blue and gold colours of the sky, bound for Toronto. Smoothly gliding on its shiny rails, it goes past and disappears among winter’s grey gnarly woods, stark and beautiful, quiet as these bleak surrounds on this cold and clear day.
I walk back to the house only partly satiated, nostalgic for the feel and sound of roaring steam.
TWENTY-TWO.
Straight after smashing successes in London, Cape Town, and Madrid, so the promotions assured us, Pamela Jones was entertaining at the Sombrero nightclub on Duke Street. Alluringly attired in a shimmering black swimsuit costume, with matching lace veil, boots, and top hat as accessories, she had a husky voice and an arrogant manner, and, as was the general consensus around our table, was as big and meaty as Africa likes its women. There were ten at our table, six from the Ministry of Transport and the rest from an Italian firm seeking business. Wine and beer flowed freely, and a lavish course of starter foods preceded the steaks and pizza. We don’t mind friendly, generous gestures from our richer friends, PS Oletunde had more than once reminded us at the office, but we make our business decisions with a calm and studied neutrality; we shall not be bought. The Italians were the most friendly of the foreign business visitors who entertained us, and the most fun, any veneer of formality peeling off at the sight of the first drink or woman. The others preferred genteel lunches or lavish, formal dinners. Eyes popped up as Miss Jones favoured our table, stopping by for tips, and the gaunt PS attempted to reach out and put a handsome baksheesh into her revealing and tempting white bosom, but she archly straightened up, caught his hand with a smack, and pushed his bills in her hat instead.
